URL
s and URLConnection
s provide a relatively
high-level mechanism for accessing resources on the Internet. Sometimes
your programs require lower-level network communication, for example,
when you want to write a client-server application.
In client-server applications, the server provides some service, such
as processing database queries or sending out current stock prices. The
client uses the service provided by the server, either displaying
database query results to the user or making stock purchase
recommendations to an investor. The communication that occurs between
the client and the server must be reliable. That is, no data can be
dropped and it must arrive on the client side in the same order in which
the server sent it.
TCP provides a reliable, point-to-point communication channel that
client-server applications on the Internet use to communicate with each
other. To communicate over TCP, a client program and a server program
establish a connection to one another. Each program binds a socket to
its end of the connection. To communicate, the client and the server
each reads from and writes to the socket bound to the connection.
A socket is one end-point of a two-way communication link between two
programs running on the network. Socket classes are used to represent
the connection between a client program and a server program. The
java.net package provides two classes--Socket and ServerSocket--that
implement the client side of the connection and the server side of the
connection, respectively.
This page contains a small example that illustrates how a client
program can read from and write to a socket.
The previous page showed an example of how to write a client program
that interacts with an existing server via a Socket object. This page
shows you how to write a program that implements the other side of the
connection--a server program.